The more the mainline Protestant denominations and related institutions (such as the National Council of Churches) lose members, fade from memory, or even seem like quaint features of post-World War II American society—akin to Sears and Roebuck or Pan Am Airlines—the more students of religion and politics in the United States will blame evangelical Protestants for Christian nationalism. That is an understandable political interpretation from those who lean Democrat or secularist, since evangelicals did become an electoral bloc that put the likes of Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush in the White House, presidents who appealed to “traditional” America and its Christian past. But as a matter of history, the idea that evangelicals are the only believers naive enough to rally under Christian nationalism is a mistake of substantial proportions even if scholars and pundits have attributed a faulty mixture of religion and politics chiefly to born-again Protestants. For instance, in his 2006 book, Randall Balmer, let the subtitle do most of his work: Thy Kingdom Come: How the Religious Right Distorts Faith and Threatens America (Basic Books, 2006). The insertion of religion in politics was, accordingly, un-American and not particularly Christian (though Roman Catholics and Eastern Orthodox might be surprised to learn this). Even Francis Fitzgerald's recent The Evangelicals: The Struggle to Shape America (Simon and Schuster, 2017) claimed that the emergence of the religious right in 1980 shocked most Americans who wondered from where its “crusade against ‘secular humanism’” came. Missing from practically all assessments of evangelicals was the well-worn path of Christian nationalism that mainline Protestants had forged. As Kevin Kruse ably demonstrated in One Nation Under God: How Corporate America Invented Christian America (Basic Books, 2016), the successful placement of “in God we trust” on U.S. currency and the insertion of “under God” in the Pledge of Allegiance happened well before the rise of the Moral Majority or Jerry Falwell's presence on the cover of Time magazine. Cold War Christian nationalism, in fact, coincided with the glory days of mainline Protestantism.

As this new book from Matthew Bowman, associate professor of history at Henderson State University, well shows, the religious right was the last in a long line of Christians in the United States who trimmed their faith to conform to basic political ideals such as equality, freedom (individual and more), democracy, and the need for virtuous officials and citizens. How Christians sorted out this parade of patriotic slogans—that Bowman herds under the phrase, “Christian republicanism”—varies according to time and place. But the most common circumstance that prodded mainline, evangelical, and black Protestants, along with Roman Catholics and Mormons, to employ a sanctified version of American politics was materialism, another large heading that refers to intellectual or political developments, from finance capitalism and Darwinism to secular humanism, that threatened to disenchant the nation's holy political order.

Of the many figures that Bowman features (more on this below), mainline Protestants set the bar for anyone who aspired to join Christian republicanism's ranks. His narrative begins with the Liberal Republican movement that in 1872 backed Horace Greeley for president, who identified Christianity with decentralization, hard work, and self-sufficiency. His next stop on the Protestant mainline is the western civilization program that Columbia University after World War I instituted to ground democracy in texts and ideas that had shaped the Christian West. The synthesis of Christianity and American liberty culminated in the 1950s religious patriotism that pitted a nation “under God” against atheistic communism, the subject of another chapter. Arguably, the last gasp of the Protestant mainline, in Bowman's telling, was the work of Robert Bellah on civil religion which had the perhaps unintended effect of further cementing the connection between the American nation and the Puritan endeavor to establish a “city on a hill.”

If simply by counting pages, mainline Protestantism accounts for half of Bowman's book, then the other half covers those on the sidelines. In each case, non-mainstream or would-be Christians had to reckon with the Protestant mainline's definitions. Bowman shows how African-American Protestants wrestled with the assumptions of western civilization at Howard University during the years surrounding World War I. By the 1960s, African-American Protestants and secularists had developed an Afro-centric reading of world history and Christianity's development that challenged Christian republicanism's naive assumptions. Roman Catholics too dissented at times by rallying support for the New Deal and its corrections to capitalism's excesses or by questioning foreign policy that merely sought to contain Communism. Bowman even includes a fascinating accounts of 1970s “cults” like the Unification Church and The Children of God that looked to the East or non-traditional forms of spirituality to save American political ideals. Such 1970s experimentation with New Age religiosity was, by Bowman's logic, the context out of which the religious right emerged. Evangelical leaders feared the influence of cults on the United States and objected to liberal Protestants’ unwillingness to defend Christian truth and the American way of life. This left the Religious Right, as Bowman shows, to be the chief defenders of the older Christian republicanism that had for over a century informed most Christian communions and American patriotism.

As welcome a reminder as Bowman's book is about the deep-seated and broad appeal of Christian nationalism in the United States, his narrative and method may leave readers puzzled. On the one hand, his research covers the era of Reconstruction to the present, but the book offers no good explanation for starting in the 1870s rather than earlier, say, with the Federalists. On the other hand, Bowman's encyclopedic inclusion of authors and public figures is as impressive as it can be frustrating. He could have told the same story by reducing the number of sources and examining careers and texts in greater detail. That approach would have allowed for closer analysis of the religious and political ideas, as well as the historical context, that informed Christian republicanism instead of the survey-like manner that Bowman adopts.

Those reservations aside, Christian is both a timely read and an impressive piece of historical scholarship.